Bitter Division For Sierra Club On Immigration

By FELICITY BARRINGER

Published: March 16, 2004

Correction and Editors' Note Appended

The leadership of the Sierra Club, the landmark environmental organization, is enmeshed in a bitter struggle over whether to advocate tough immigration restrictions as a way to control environmental damage that has been associated with rapid population growth.

The debate is unusual in its intensity, even for an organization whose fractious disputes are legendary. It focuses on efforts by several outsiders and grass-roots members of the club to win seats on the board of directors. The dissident group is led by Richard D. Lamm, the former Democratic governor of Colorado, who has argued for 20 years that national policies leave the country open to unsustainable immigration.

At stake is the leadership of an organization of 750,000 members that has a 112-year history of pushing conservation and pollution issues into the national consciousness and federal law.

For weeks, both camps have issued charges and countercharges and the dissidents have filed two lawsuits, neither of which is active.

For starters, the executive director of the club, Carl Pope, said that Mr. Lamm's supporters were ''in bed with racists.'' An internal group supporting the mainstream candidates further contends that Mr. Lamm and his fellow candidates are unwitting blocking backs for a stealthy network of nativist groups that wants to take control of the organization, which was founded by a Scottish immigrant, John Muir.

In response, those who support immigration controls of some sort argue that the club's leadership must confront the roots of future environmental crises. Mr. Lamm defended his position, saying charges of indirect connections to racist groups are ''right out of Joe McCarthy.''

In a telephone interview, Mr. Lamm said: ''I have been monomaniacal in some ways about how America is ducking this issue. I have a grandchild in utero. If that child is long-lived, she might see a billion Americans.''

Mr. Lamm freely acknowledges that he has not been a member of the Sierra Club for years, but said he wanted to become an active participant to push the immigration issue. Over the past several decades, he has shown a penchant for divisive issues, saying at one point that the terminally ill had a ''duty to die.''

Because the board already includes several members who have challenged their fellow directors on immigration and development issues, the election of more directors from outside the club leadership could put majority power in the hands of the challengers and alter the group's positions on everything from immigration to regional and local development.

Immigration is the flashpoint issue. About 39 percent of the United States' population gain over the past decade is a result of direct immigration, Census Bureau statistics show; the most recent annual figure is 45 percent. Of that, an estimated 288,000, or 20 percent of the total, have settled in California, the Sierra Club's home base.

Twice in the last eight years, the club has become embroiled in sharp debates over the approach to take on population and immigration issues. Mr. Lamm says he wants to put immigration back on the agenda, where it was until 1996 when the club's board decided to take a neutral stance on the issue. Two years later, the membership voted by a 3-to-2 ratio to maintain that stance.

Since then, at least five people who were not endorsed by the board's leadership have been elected to the 15-member board by the members. Under the club's rotation system, directors serve for three years; five are elected each year.

The Sierra Club, invigorated in the 1950's and 1960's by David Brower, has an annual budget of $83 million. The board election began this month; ballots are to be counted April 21.

In an interview on Friday, Mr. Pope, the executive director, said there were two essential reasons for the rancorous dispute. One is the outside candidates' lack of active involvement in the club. The second is their choice of a centerpiece issue. During a similar debate some years ago, Mr. Pope said, he decided that ''this issue is so deeply charged with a lot of issues, including xenophobia and racism, that you can't get into it and have a clean debate and therefore you just couldn't try.''

Also, he said, ''People who are good people get sucked up with people I think are not good people.''

The leaders of the antiestablishment faction argue that the debate has been manipulated to bring up the electric issue of race because the leadership is desperately trying to keep control and block independent-minded people from the board.

Among the dissidents on the board is Paul Watson, a Canadian who was a co-founder of Greenpeace and who has bitterly opposed the board majority on a number of issues. Mr. Watson, whose passion for marine life has led him to ram boats he deems to be fishing illegally, left Greenpeace to found a group called the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

Mr. Watson, who describes himself as ''antitrapping and antihunting,'' but rejects the label of animal rights supporter, nonetheless told an animal rights convention last fall, ''One of the reasons that I'm on the Sierra Club board of directors right now is to try and change it -- we're only three directors away from controlling that board.''

Correction: March 18, 2004, Thursday A front-page article on Tuesday about elections for the board of the Sierra Club included an erroneous quotation from remarks made in 1984 by Richard D. Lamm, former Democratic governor of Colorado, who is leading a group of challengers for seats. In the 1984 speech, Mr. Lamm said, ''We've got a duty to die and get out of the way with all of our machines and artificial hearts and everything else like that and let the other society, our kids, build a reasonable life.'' As The Times acknowledged in a 1993 editors' note, he did not say the terminally ill had a ''duty to die.'' Editors' Note: March 26, 2004, Friday A front-page article on March 16 about board elections for the Sierra Club described dissident candidates who favor restrictions on immigration. Club officials characterized supporters of the dissidents as having ties to racist groups or Web sites and as unwitting blocking backs for nativist groups. A response from one candidate, Frank L. Morris, a retired professor and former executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, should have been obtained along with those of other candidates. Mr. Morris disputes those characterizations, saying his support for limiting immigration reflects concerns among African-Americans and others that unchecked immigration had hurt their economic opportunities. ''To have this considered a position as a front for racists and Nazis is beyond the pale,'' he wrote in an e-mail message. In addition, he listed other campaign positions critical of the organization's leadership and agenda, contending that the immigration platform was not a ''centerpiece'' of his candidacy as club officials contended.